Bushtarion: Head Up Your Own Gardening Company

Bushtarion is a free online multiplayer strategy war game which allows you to develop down an in-depth technology tree to gain access to new units and abilities, play as a solo or in an alliance with equal chances of success, battle it out across different ranking systems aiming for permanent places in the games portal history pages, go bounty hunting or become an evil player, and much more!

You play with one account, and from that account you actually run your own gardening company. The basic idea is to become the biggest gardening company around, either through clever diplomacy, crafty planning, brute force or any other methods you can use to your advantage. You can buy land, steal land from other people, develop new technologies and hire a huge variety of units that can aid you or hinder your enemies. You grow and plant seeds, and sell them for money. You have to compete against a full-blown weather system that has days, nights, seasons and years, and try to forecast the weather yourself. You can play by yourself, as well as join (or even create) an alliance that will allow you to group up with a number of other companies to work together and take down larger companies with your combined forces, or fight off the hordes of enemies together.

In Bushtarion, land is extremely important to the success or failure of your company - you need land to grow your plants on, and the more land you have, the more plants you can plant, ultimately leading to a greater income which you will need to expand your company further.

You need "Gardener" and "Harvester" units to handle your land, plants and seeds, and the more land you have, the more gardener and harvester units you will need to handle the ever increasing workload. They will also work far less efficiently at night time than they will at day time (at a mere 5% usual efficiency in fact), so for maximum efficiency both day and night you will eventually need a huge amount of them both - though the figures you will have to learn for yourself through experience.

Tick Based Game

Bushtarion is not a "Live Game" - it is a "Tick Based Game", and Bushtarion runs a "Tick" every 10 minutes. What this means is that every 10 minutes, Bushtarion "Ticks Over" (like an engine), which takes roughly 5 seconds to do. Every time it "Ticks Over", things happen - the weather can change, armies move closer to their targets, battles occur, seeds get harvested, plants are planted and grown, developments progress, etc. etc. If you find this concept confusing - don't be alarmed, you will soon get in to the swing of things, it is not as complicated as it sounds.

In Bushtarion, in order to "claim" a bounty, you need to either steal land from the player, or kill their troops while they are at their own company (killing them by defending against, or when they are defending somebody else against you, is not seen as "pro-active bounty hunting" by the Bounty Hunters Guild). The amount of bounty you actually receive is dependant upon a number of factors. First and most important is their bounty level. Then of course is how many troops you actually kill/how much land you actually steal. But also the nature of your attack can impact how much of the bounty the Bounty Hunters Guild gives you - attacking somebody at 50% of your size with a couple of friends isn't seen as something a real bounty hunter would do, and so the bounty paid to you will reflect this. It is not always easy to get the maximum bounty percentage from a target first time, nor is it meant to be - real bounty hunters have to work for their money, and go after real challenges!

Alliance

Alliances are a very important part of Bushtarion. If, however, your alliance is uncoordinated, and seldom work together than you will be at a severe disadvantage. Teamwork is an important aspect of making successful attacks and rising in rank. These tactics are just a selection of the many ways to work together as a team, ranging from ways to best land on opponents, or win inter-alliance wars. Remember though, that this list is by no means exhaustive, and you can often devise effective tactics yourself - these all started that way!

So, join or form an alliance and develop vast alliance HQs, working with friends to climb to the top... or alternatively play solo and get additional help from automated government defence such as SAS and Riot Police if somebody tries hitting you with a vastly overwhelming force.